Lecture 3 CS148/248: Interactive Narrative UC Santa Cruz School of Engineering 12 Jan 2009

UC SANTA CRUZ Introduction to narratology  Narratology – a structuralist analysis of narrative  Enabling move: separating the “objective” story from the presented story  Story/fabula – The objective sequence of events that constitutes the story  Discourse/sjuzhet – The presentation of the story (always involves manipulation)  Diegesis – The story world, the time-space continuum of the story (the story is a sequences of events in the diegetic world)  Narration – the mechanics by which the discourse is produced from the story (e.g. third vs. first person etc.)

UC SANTA CRUZ The narrative situation Diegetic universe Story prolepsis (flash-forward) analepsis (flash-back) Discourse Focalization Interpretation

UC SANTA CRUZ Narrative, Media, Modes  In order to be able to talk about interactive narrative, one must be able to talk about narrative in different media (since various forms of interactive narrative will constitute new media)  Classical narratology tends towards privileging specific media  Radical media relativism argues that signifier can’t be separated from signified – therefore there’s no way to talk about “narrative” in the abstract  Other theorists have so generalized the notion of narrative, that it ceases to form a coherent category  Narratives of identity  Grand narratives of history  Cultural narrative  Ryan’s goal in this chapter is to define a notion of narrative powerful enough to define a coherent category, but general enough to be medium independent

UC SANTA CRUZ Narrative dimensions  Consider “narrativeness” a scalar value (more or less narrative) rather than a boolean value (is or is not a narrative)  Do this by defining 8 narrative dimensions – if a specific media instance strongly has all these properties, then it has very high narrativeness (a “classical” story)  Subsets of the dimensions can be considered for specific purposes  Spatial Dimension  1. Narrative must be about a world populated by individuated existents  Temporal Dimension  2. The world must be situated in time and undergo significant transformations  3. The transformations must be caused by non-habitual physical events

UC SANTA CRUZ Narrative dimensions (continued)  Mental Dimension  4. Some of the participants in the events must be intelligent agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the states of the world  5. Some of the events must be purposeful actions by these agents, motivated by identifiable goals and plans  Formal and Pragmatic Dimensions  6. The sequence must form a unified causal chain and lead to closure  7. The occurrence of at least some of these events must be asserted as fact in the story world  8. The story must communicate something meaningful to the recipient

UC SANTA CRUZ The cognitive skills of narrative interpretation  Understanding a narrative involves the exercise of multiple cognitive skills  Focusing thought on specific objects cut out from the flux of perception  Inferring causal relationships between states and events  Situating events in time  Reconstructing content of other people’s minds based on their behavior  But the exercise of these cognitive skills alone does not make something a narrative – only when all of these skills come together to construct a stable mental image do we have narrative

UC SANTA CRUZ Narrative modes  In order to develop a media-free narratology, we need to understand the various mechanisms by which narrative scripts can be evoked  A narrative script is the mental image of the narrative  The standard way of evoking narrative scripts is for someone to tell someone else that something happened (narrating a story)  A narrative mode is a distinct way to bring to mind the cognitive construct that defines narrativity  Ryan defines a number of dimensions that characterize different narrative modes  These dimensions are not completely independent

UC SANTA CRUZ Narrative modes (continued)  External/Internal  In external mode, narratives are encoded in material signs  Internal mode does not involve textualization  Fictional/Nonfictional  Whether the narrative involves this world or a possible world  Representational/Simulative  Representational mode encodes a fixed sequence (isolates a fixed possibility)  Simulative mode is productive of multiple possibilities  Diegetic/mimetic  In diegetic mode, the narrative is communicated through telling  In mimetic mode, the narrative is communicated through showing

UC SANTA CRUZ Narrative modes (continued)  Autotelic/Utilitarian  In autotelic mode, a story is told for its own sake  In utilitarian mode, a story is subordinated to another goal  Autonomous/Illustrative  In autonomous mode, the story is new to the receiver  In illustrative mode, the story retells and completes a story, depending on the receiver’s previous knowledge  Scripted/Emergent  In scripted mode, story and discourse are fixed  In emergent mode, discourse and some aspects of story are created live  Receptive/Participatory  In receptive mode, the recipient plays no role in discourse or story  In participatory mode (subcategory of emergent), the active participation of the recipient actualizes and completes the story on the level of discourse and/or story

UC SANTA CRUZ Narrative modes (continued)  Determinate/indeterminate  In determinate mode, the text specifies enough points along the story arc to form a definite script  In indeterminate mode, only a few points are given – the recipient fills in the rest  Retrospective/simultaneous/prospective  The recounting of past, current, or future events  Literal/metaphorical  In literal mode, the narrative satisfies most or all of the 8 definitional dimensions  In metaphorical mode, there are violations of a number of the dimensions  The goal of this distinction is to recognize the expanded notions of the term “narrative” without sacrificing the precision of the core construct

UC SANTA CRUZ What are media?  Two contrasting views: the pipe vs. language  The pipe view enables transmedial analysis but ignores the affordances of different media  E.g. TV – a transmissive medium, but has its own affordances  The language view admits the affordances of different media, but risks radical media relativism  The language notion of media is primary – there’s nothing to transmit through a pipe unless it has first been encoded in language  There may be no pure pipes – things that look like pipes may all have language-like affordances  Since the language view is primary, Ryan wants to find a middle ground that recognizes the material support of semiotic languages, will avoiding both the media relativist and pipe views

UC SANTA CRUZ Three ways to analyze media  Media as semiotic phenomena – broad categories of sign systems  Language  Images  Music  Media as technologies  Allows us to drill in on specific material supports – fractures broad categories of sign systems into specific subtypes  E.g. Ong’s analysis of the shift from oral culture, to writing, to printing  Media as cultural practice (communities of practice)  Lack a distinct semiotic and technological identity (e.g. newspapers vs. books)  Evolution of media forms depends on cultural pressures

UC SANTA CRUZ Narrative differences across media  Narrative differences across media play out in three different narrative domains  Semantics (plot or story)  Syntax (discourse)  Pragmatics (uses of narrative)  Plot or story  Film prefers dramatic narratives structured by Aristotelian arc – TV prefers episodic narratives with multiple plot lines – computer games prefer quest narratives with a single plot line divided into multiple autonomous episodes  Discourse  Comics represent time via space using distinct frames, film presents a continuously moving image with edits  Uses of narrative  Blogging (posting of private diaries), tabletop RPGs (group improvisational stories)

UC SANTA CRUZ Genre vs. medium  A medium is defined by a semiotic language and a technological support that provide specific expressive affordances  A genre is a set of explicit rules for using a medium in a specific way  The distinction can be fuzzy  A medium is defined by cultural forces, but so is a genre (genre can reside in communities of practice)  Different media employ different semiotic languages, but genre conventions can be understood as semiotic sub-languages  Examples  The print novel is a medium – horror stories and detective stories are genres  Film is a medium – the light romantic comedy and the road movie are genres